Our River Street Location

Our River Street location is on the most famous street in Savannah! Our restaurant is on the edge of the Savannah River amongst history and culture.

A brief history of our River Street location…

Bernie’s resides in a pre-Civil War warehouse built in 1817 that was used to store cotton bound to destinations all over the world. The first two floors of the building were constructed with ballast stones used to weigh down the empty ships sailing into the Savannah harbor to pick up cotton. These “cobblestones” were discarded to make room for their cargo and reused to build warehouses and pave River Street.

The extra wide, arched doorways you see were designed to make it easy to move cotton bales in and out of the warehouses. In 1799 a gentleman by the name of Eli Whitney was invited to Savannah by the widow of General Nathaniel Greene to provide tutoring for her children. During his stay, Mrs. Greene mentioned the difficulty that farmers had in separating the cotton seed from the plant’s tenacious fibers. Intrigued by the problem, Mr. Whitney locked himself away in the barn of the plantation for ten days, emerging with a prototype of his now-famous cotton gin. His invention was largely responsible for making cotton “King” of southern commerce.

The subsequent prosperity led to expansions of this building, when the top three floor were added in 1853.